I would. Ever notice why almost every studio or mixing/mastering station has these speakers, with the white cones? They're yamahas, and they're not particually good. I think it was Tom Dowd who said "If we can make it sound great on this, we can make it sound good on ANYTHING."

Just a bit of advice I'll give you as a producer that opened a whole new world to me when I learned it: Volume doesn't equal loud. If you have lousy "just bass" tone, no matter how loud you are, you will not be heard, just felt. Introduce more highs and mids until everything sits just right.

Visualize your song as one bit EQ, decide where you want everything to go and how you will get it there. It sounds weird but... like this.

Bass Drum
Bass
Guitar
Snare
Cymbals/Ambience

Very generic, but lets say that's how you want things from low to high. Master/EQ everything until it fits in that catagory. With something linking each element, unless you want it to remain in it's own space.

I don't make any damn sense: But look at your songs abstractly. Your song is a three dimentional space. Figure where everything should rest.

Oh and my question about your songs... when you say your songs are MP3s, do you mean your tracks are MP3s? And by that I mean, are you asking us to EQ your songs? Because Mastering usually requires access to all tracks... not just the songs.

I would. Ever notice why almost every studio or mixing/mastering station has these speakers, with the white cones? They're yamahas, and they're not particually good. I think it was Tom Dowd who said "If we can make it sound great on this, we can make it sound good on ANYTHING."

Click to expand...

Good old Yamaha NS-10s... can't hear any bass on those things.

I wholeheartedly agree with Matt about balancing the frequencies of all the elements in the mix, giving everything it's own sonic space. However, once you get to the mastering stage you should only be working off a 2-track stereo mix that's already finalized by the mix engineer. If it's a crappy mix to begin with, the mastering engineer will really have his work cut out for him and may not be able to help things much. If it's a great mix, the mastering engineer may just compress it slightly and consider it done.

I'd take a quick stab at it, but mastering an .mp3 won't work too well anyway... at least give us a .wav to work with.